戴红帽的男子

Around 1490 Venetian painters were quietly changing how a face was recorded. The old civic profile, stiff as a coin, was giving way to a head turned toward the viewer with real country opening up behind it. That Flemish-tinged idea had reached the lagoon through the painter Antonello da Messina a decade earlier, and you can feel it in this young man in his red cap. Who he was, nobody knows, and the attribution wanders too. It is usually filed under Vittore Carpaccio, Venice's great storyteller of civic pageant, though names from Bartolomeo Montagna to the young Lorenzo Lotto have been floated. Behind the sitter sits the giveaway of the new fashion, a lake, a strip of farmland, and mountains dissolving into a far haze.